SciSpace vs Elicit vs Explainpaper vs Elicit (Scholarcy)
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
SciSpace
AI copilot for academic reading
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Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
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Explainpaper
Highlight a confusing line in a paper, get a plain-English fix.
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Elicit (Scholarcy)
Turns papers into structured flashcards: findings, methods, refs.
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 6 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | 5 questions per day per paper | Basic: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus | 5 paper uploads per month | 5 paper summaries per month |
| Paid from | Premium $12/mo (annual) or $20/mo; Teams $8-18/seat/mo | Plus $12/mo; Pro $49/mo; Team $79/mo | $12/month (Pro) | $9.99/month (Personal) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 5m+ researchers | 200k+ researchers | 200k+ users | 1m+ researchers |
| Founded | 2015 | 2018 | 2022 | 2018 |
| Maker | Typeset.io | Ought (non-profit) | Aman Jain | Phil Gooch |
| Verdict | SciSpace pulls double duty as a paper reader and a literature-review engine: highlight jargon or an equation for a plain explanation, run citation-backed Q&A across a corpus, or hand its Deep Review agent a topic and... |
Elicit owns the literature-review niche: it searches 138 million papers, pulls methods, sample sizes and findings into structured comparison tables, and links every extraction back to source text, which makes verificatio... |
Explainpaper does one thing: upload a paper, highlight a passage that's losing you, and get a plain-English explanation tied to that specific paper rather than a generic textbook definition. Follow-up questions turn it i... |
Scholarcy does one job: feed it a paper and it hands back a structured summary — key findings, methods, tables, a pulled reference list — instead of you reading twenty pages to get there. The Chrome extension is the most... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.